The Personal Blog of Dr Banksy*.

Well folks, here we are. After 12 long, arduous weeks of frankly fabulous work, I've got my final display ready for Weston's summer art show. Mounting the pieces was quite meticulous, but I managed to get them looking pretty good with the help of a few chums. Using a craft knife to get some of the air bubbles out of the vinyl worked well - just a small incision to allow somewhere for the air to escape to, and then simply pushing the air out with a finger. Nice and easy, and doesn't look half bad. Here's the completed Spy vs. Spy piece. I also added a small information plaque to give some background info about both pieces. This was very easily done via the use of Microsoft Publisher's text box tool, applying a 4pt stroke, bevel-design border, and spray-mounting each printed-to-paper design onto some foam mount board (the same stuff I used for my spray-painted scissor stencils, which I dotted around the piece). I had to think carefully about the position of the...

In order to create a couple of Banksy-esque final pieces, I decided to study not just the artist himself, but also his relation to the graffiti scene. This would help me to find my rhythm with the project, sparking the generation of ideas and keeping the artistic process fresh, exciting and interesting. I had visited the Bristol museum as part of a casual family trip and was able to pick up a couple of books on Banksy in order to fulfill these two research aims. I began with a book which describes Banksy's relation to graffiti culture, and also into the inner workings of the movement itself. Banksy: The Bristol Legacy (edited by Paul Gough and published in 2012) delved into this in great detail, comprising the viewpoints of a range of people (including art critics and university researchers) on Banksy and graffiti, as well as a very informative history of graffiti in Bristol. I've learned that Bristol has been attached to the graffiti movement for far longer than I had orig...